As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

You can live your whole life not realizing that what you're looking for is right in front of you.

I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.

Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.

I think probably I'm quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I'm very embarrassed by sentiment. I'm very embarrassed by corniness.

As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.